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Show THE JOURNEY TO UTAH. 47 ' LAYING ON OF HANDS." were destined to a " Josephite" settlement in . Iowa, and at Council Bluffs they met three hundred new converts on their way to Utah, in charge of a bishop and platoon of elders. But there was very little intercourse between the two. The latter were fresh, hopeful, cheery, singing the " songs of Zion," and rejoicing in their speedy escape from " Babylon;" the recusants sad, weary, half mad and wholly heart-sick. Quick to curse Brigham, they were yet but half cured of their folly, and prepared to surrender mind and conscience to another phase of the same delu-sion. The elders watch-ed their new recruits without appearing to do so, and at sight of the others were full of warnings and allusions to Demas and those who kept not the faith, and were given over to be damned. In those days most of the dissenting Saints left Utah; now they remain, and with the skeptical young Mor-mons are building up a party which is very troublesome to Brigham. Council Bluifs was once almost a Mormon town, and many places in the vicinity were settled entirely by that sect. Apostates by thou-sands are scattered through Iowa, in faith " half Mormon and half nothing," but in practice good and industrious citizens. Mormonism does not make a man a fanatic, unless he goes where the Church has the majority and rules the country. Florence, six miles above Omaha, with as pretty a site as I saw in Nebraska, was the original winter quarters of the main body in their great exodus ; and according to the sanguine belief of the Gentiles who succeeded them, was to have been the great city instead of Omaha. It had the start, and no man can say why it should not have held . it. But there is a mysterious law which governs the location of great cities, and Florence is now only a pretty suburb to the metropolis of Nebraska. The last of July, 1868, 1 took the evening train for Laramie, then the terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad. For a hundred and fifty miles from Omaha the Platte Valley, which the road follows, is one of the rich-est in the world. Then a change begins, and the country is higher, dryer, and more barren with every hour's travel toward the mountains. It is all the way up- hill. Omaha is 912 feet above sea- level; Cheyenne |
